Our Cyberpunk 2077 Rating: Could Have Been the Best Game

Last Updated on December 15, 2020 by Jay

Cyberpunk officially came out exactly a week ago. The good news is that the story is just as good as most of us expected, if not better. The bad news is that as you probably already know, there are lots of issues with it. This is our short Cyberpunk 2077 rating that we are delivering after finishing the main storyline – not an in-depth review. 

Here is all we love and hate about it in less than 5 minutes!

Our test rig: 

• Ryzen 2600
• GTX 1060 6GB
• 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM
• Kingston A400 

Performance Problems

Let’s start by getting one thing that probably all of you know about right now, the problems. The game runs like crap on old-gen consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox One – which is quite a big problem considering how most of us still can’t even get our hands on the new generation of consoles. 

And we are not just talking about lag spikes here. There are:

• Numerous bugs with some of them being game-breaking
• Slow-loading textures on consoles with HDDs
• Blurry/low resolution – maybe 720P with downscaling by the looks of it
• Low framerates  – often below 30FPS with dips down to 15FPS and often 20FPS stable when driving
• Crashes

And that’s without including anything about the actual game itself. 

Things are so bad that CD Projekt Red officially apologized for the mess and stated that console owners can get a refund if they wish to. But, for those who wish to wait, the company is trying their best to bring the game into a playable state. 

Thankfully, Cyberpunk is kind of okay on the more powerful consoles such as the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro along with the next-gen consoles. And it also looks and runs fantastic on beefy computers – emphasis on “beefy” here as the recommended specs barely maintain 40FPS on 1080P.

Even low settings gave us drops below 30FPS when driving or fighting. 

Things got much better by applying a few performance mods to make the game utilize our 6 Ryzen threads and remove TAA. But that’s not something that we should get our dirty hands for in a AAA game in the first place. 

What Could Have Easily Been Game of the Year

Glitches, bugs, and performance issues aside, Cyberpunk is a crazy-good game, actually. It could have easily been game of the year – and maybe it can still be if CD Projekt Red fixes it. 

The story is amazing with plenty of great characters and choices along with plenty of quests to do. So many, actually, that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose track of what’s going on. It’s not unusual to receive 3 phone-calls for 3 more things to do while we are driving towards the next destination. You can probably easily get more than 100 hours. 

The problem is that even on PC when the game works just fine, there is a lot of missed potential. 

• Cops spawn everywhere and there are no police car chases
• Driving physics feel mediocre at best
• AI is kind of stupid
• The city may be huge but it often feels lifeless
• Most attachments are just improvements to power, health, and damage

There is a lot of missed potential here. Cop chases used to be one of our favorite games in GTA games that are more than a decade old now and even that is missing. Never mind the missed Cyber potential such as giving yourself superhuman strength, jumping tens of meters high with reinforced legs and skeleton, climbing the tallest buildings, night vision, X-Ray vision, and other things like that. 

Overall, Cyberpunk had the potential to be one of the best games of all time. At least we still get a great story and probably the most beautiful city we’ve seen yet.

• PC: 8/10
• Old-gen Consoles: 2/10 (At least a 6/10 if they fix the issues)
• New-gen Consoles: 6/10 (Will probably change to the same PC score after the next-gen patch is added)

And that concludes our Cyberpunk 2077 rating.

Available on: 

• PC
• PS4/Pro
• Xbox One/X
• Xbox One Series X/S and PS5 with backwards compatibility until the next-gen version is made

• Author
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George Kasiouras

Editor at Why The Lucky Stiff

George has been reading smartphone reviews since the days where single-core devices and Android 2.0 were a thing. And while he never expected to be the one to write them, here we are today. When he is not writing about tech, you'll find him writing novels, playing games, watching shows or anime, or maybe even soloing with his guitar.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-k-8246a1169/

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